Is Marketing or Product King of the Company?

As a company, your job is to make a product you know how to market, not to market a product you know how to make. Remember Coleco? The toy company behind the Colecovision videogame system? Well, Coleco originally stood for “COnnecticut LEather COmpany”. They also made plastic portable swimming pools, oh, and Cabbage Patch Kids. In the 21st century, making stuff is easy to outsource. Even idea generation can be outsourced. Successful marketing strategies are the hardest thing in the world to come by. If you have one, throw everything else out.

The argument makes sense. But on the other hand, some great products don't need much marketing at all (DropBox, Survey Monkey). And in an era of increasing transparency, it is hard to cover up a bad product with good marketing. Which should come first, the product or the marketing? Should the product adapt to the marketing? Or should the marketing adapt to the product? Does the answer differ if you rely on inbound or outbound marketing? I'm particularly curious about what YOU think... leave a comment and let me know?

Products that don't need much marketing have identified a pain point and met a need. Products that need more marketing are those that seek to convince someone they have a need that needs to be met. Like Gillette's multi-blade razor marketing. They're telling you you need more blades for more effective shaving.

Ryan Malone

They all play off each other - products don't market themselves - rarely and especially offline. Even if you have a great product and have success marketing it, you have to maintain it's lead. Online companies especially are prone to have a great start and drinking their own marketing Kool-Aid. The world passes them buy while they add minor changes that don't matter to most users.

NET-NET - you have a small window where marketing or product only can survive, but it is small and you need to play off both.

Regarding your comment about Dropbox and SurveyMonkey not needing much marketing - refer to my first point in my blog post: Everything is marketing! Rock solid reliability and delightful user interfaces are things Dropbox and SurveyMonkey know how to do extremely well, and are both generate highly positive word of mouth - Voila! Marketing!

Is it possible that this " Should the product adapt to the marketing? Or should the marketing adapt to the product?" is the wrong question to ask? Perhaps asking "Is your organization market driven or product driven?" Product driven: you have the ability to build and react to evolving demand. Market driven: you master the problems in the marketplace and build a something to solve them.

This question reminds me of how Henry Ford used his "Bottom-Up" method for all his executives. No matter who you were, you started on the assembly line. I believe the best marketers understand their product in and out. This requires hands on training and experience so you can be assured that your positioning will be genuine. How can you be successful in your marketing without truly understanding and living the product? If you look at in such a way product definitely comes first.

This sounds a lot like the premise for Steven Gary Blank's book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." Rejecting the reliance on Product Development models and instead gearing (a startup) around Customer Development allows for rapid iterations based on lessons learned about potential customers & their market. With this concept in mind, my answer would be: Neither the product nor marketing is king- the customer is!

Just today I came across a post that 60% of purchases are influenced by online ratings. So it would seem that you need to have a high quality product regardless of your marketing, right? Can't put lipstick on a pig? NOT so fast. I worked in a company that had engineers tear apart all of our competitors' products and analyze their effectiveness the minute they hit the shelves. Many were BAD but most were just very similar to the point where you could not tell their performance apart. Time and again, despite this, the ones with the best marketing campaigns were rated higher in user ratings.